Wednesday, July 19, 2017

They'll Never Stop The Simpsons (The Simpsons: Loser Takes All)

The Simpsons, a brief history: The series began on a small, budding channel called Fox. The Tracey Ulman show wanted short animated sketches between commercials and the actual show, so after finding Matt Groenings work, they hired him. The rest, as they say, is history. As of this review, 630 episodes aired or plan to air, with more likely coming. With several Bart based Video games, and merchandise to fill the Grand Canyon, The Simpsons have become a legacy in our time. But this week: LOSER Takes All!

GAME DESCRIPTION: Loser Takes All is a game published by RoseArt for 2-6 players. The objective is to end the game with the lowest score possible, giving away tokens and money to ensure you are the "loser".

SET-UP: Each player starts with 10 Junk Food tokens 20 Simpsons Money. Each player takes a Simpsons token and the 5 Character cards associated with that token. Place your Character cards face-up in front of you, and place your token anywhere on the board. The youngest player begins.

MOVING: During their turn, the player spins the spinner and moves according to the directions. If a number is rolled, the player may move any combination vertically and horizontally, but they may only make one direction change per turn, and they may NOT backtrack onto any previous space.

SPACES: There ares several different kinds of spaces, including:

Event: Follow the instructions on the board.

Hazard: Marked with a Radiation symbol, these are generally negative.

Question: May also be marked with a Question Mark.

QUESTIONS: When a player lands on a Question space, they draw a Question List card and choose a player. The turn player reads either the first or next question in the List out loud, and writes their answer down on a piece of paper, then the chosen player responds with the answer they think the turn player wrote down. If the answers are closely matching, the chosen player flips 1 of their Character cards face-down. If the answers are different, the turn player flips their Character card face-down. The turn then ends.

WINNING: Once a player has flipped all 5 of their Character cards face-down, the game ends. Each player scores 1 point for each Simpsons Money bill and Junk Food token they collected, 3 points for each of that players character-card still face up, and if any player is located anywhere in the bottom row of the board at the end of the game, they add 5 points to their final score. The player with the lowest score wins!

CONCLUSION: Loser Takes All is a pretty mediocre game, very cut and dry, simple, by the books board game for the most part. It takes no risks and no solid mechanics from its theme. There are 2 things which really stand out, however. Being able to move any direction on the board is intriguing, and makes for some possibly interesting strategy, if there was any real strategy here. The other is the questions. This could be a decent ice-breaker game at a Con or a get together with a new group. But these alone can't save the game from being a pretty generic, non-Simpsony Simpsons game. Try it out if you'd like, but there are more interesting Ice-Breaker games, and more interesting games in general.